On 2025-12-11, Paul M. Foster wrote: > On systems which don't use systemd, the log files are in clear text, and you > can simply use cat or more or less and/or grep to read through the files. This > isn't true for systemd systems. Instead, the log file(s) are more or less > binary. I don't like that. Thus, I am looking for a way to have clear text log > files while still running systemd (since I really can't avoid systemd on > Debian).
You have to install rsyslog. Then create or change /etc/systemd/journald.conf to add that: Storage=none ForwardToSyslog=yes Storage to avoid to keep dup logs in journal and ForwardToSyslog to get all in rsyslog. Reload journald after. And don't forget to delete /var/log/journal after rsyslog is ok
